Sooner or later, bad things happen to everyone. That’s inevitable. The problem is that people often learn the wrong lessons from their misfortunes.
Across Cascadia and beyond, proponents of unified primaries and ranked choice voting just had bad things happen to them. They lost four out of five statewide ballot measures in Cascadia and matched that record elsewhere. What’s important now is to avoid learning the wrong lesson.
The wrong lesson would be that winning a better democracy is hopeless—an impossible get.
It is not. It’s just hard. You lose more often than you win. You have to keep trying, even when the odds are against you. In fact, you have to study your losses assiduously and learn from them: they reveal the obstacles between you and victory. As Thomas Edison said about the trial and error required to invent the light bulb, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”
You have to persevere because success, when it comes, brings immense payoffs. Open primaries and ranked choice voting are steps toward a public sector that can better do its jobs, from educating children to maintaining roads, from safeguarding borders to defending rights, from policing crime to cleaning the air. Specifically, unified primaries and ranked choice voting upgrade representation, dampen extremism and polarization, and favor leaders intent on governing, rather than grandstanding. They yield a public sector that is better able to solve problems.
Losing and winning
Proponents of reform swelled with optimism in 2024 as one after another state put change on its ballot: in Idaho, Montana, and Oregon within Cascadia, and in five states outside Cascadia. Conversely, they grew concerned about an attempt to repeal open primaries and ranked choice voting in Alaska.
The win/loss record left many of them disheartened (see table). Alaska was the only state where pro-reform votes topped 50 percent. Voters there rejected an attempt to repeal its model election system, but the final ballot gap was only 0.2 percentage points, barely a win.
The measure next closest to winning on the list of Cascadian questions was Montana’s Constitutional Initiative 126, which captured almost 49 percent of votes. It would have enacted unified, all-candidate, top-four primaries for most federal and state elections.
Trailing behind with 42 percent support was Oregon’s Measure 117, which would have used ranked choice voting in both party primaries and general elections for federal and statewide executive offices.
Then came another Montana Constitutional Initiative, number 127, which required majority winners in Montana elections, but left the state legislature to decide how to achieve that goal. The logical options would have been instant runoffs with ranked choice voting or delayed conventional runoffs. The measure gained support of less than 40 percent.
Finally, Idaho Proposition 1, which would have replicated Alaska’s system of open, top-four primaries and ranked choice general elections in the Gem State, lagged the field. A little more than 30 percent of voters cast their ballots in its favor.
In sum, therefore, November 5 brought one win (by a hair), one near miss, and three lopsided losses for election reform in Cascadia. Meanwhile, elsewhere, Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada rejected reform with support in the mid-forties, and South Dakota did so in the low forties. Among the ten ballot measures in populous jurisdictions for electoral reforms involving open primaries or ranked choice voting (five within and five without Cascadia), only in Washington, DC, did voters newly embrace reform. They did so with enthusiasm, approving ranked choice voting by 73 percent.1
Losing expensively
One source of encouragement in this gloomy picture is that Cascadian places familiar with ranked choice voting, including Benton County, Oregon, and the state of Alaska (which already use it) and Portland, Oregon (which launched it in November), were the most supportive. They provided majority support for reform.2
One source of discouragement is that everywhere in Cascadia, the pro-reform campaigns spent more money than the anti-reform side—much more. Overall, pro-reform campaigns in the region spent $44.8 million, against their opponents’ $3.6 million.
Oregon barely had a “no” campaign, with opponents spending less than $15,000 while reformers there spent $9 million. Still, only 42 percent of voters chose “yes.” In Montana, the yes campaign for Constitutional Initiatives 126 (open primaries) and 127 (majority winners) spent about $22 million, while opponents spent an estimated $3 million.3 In Idaho, reformers spent more than $5 million, while opponents spent less than $500,000.4
Meanwhile, defeating the repeal of Alaska’s election system required the pro-reform campaign to outspend their opponents a hundred times over. Reformers in the 49th state spent more than $13 million to win not quite 161,000 votes—more than $80 per vote—while repeal proponents only spent about $100,000 to earn almost as many votes, at a cost of 70 cents per vote. In the end, only 664 votes separated the two sides. If that’s what it takes to defend an existing reform, well, King Pyrrhus’s line comes to mind: “Another such victory, and we are undone.”
Losing repeatedly
A cynic might quip that reformers lost badly, but at least they spent a fortune doing it. Such cynicism is unwarranted, though. Winning election reforms at the ballot box is hard. Very hard.
People vote no by default on citizens’ initiatives, as every political pollster will tell you. Voters understand that passing laws is the legislature’s job, so their attitude toward proposals to bypass lawmakers is “impress me!”
This default is especially strong for election reforms. Even if they are convinced that the status quo is rigged against them, voters view warily any proposal to change it. Altering the way they vote or how their vote counts seem fishy to them. Skepticism about politics is so pervasive that many are convinced powerful interests pull the strings of every ballot measure. When democracy reforms come up, they suspect self-serving ploys and attempts to dupe them. And they vote no.
Beating the odds is unusual, and citizens’ initiative ballot questions lose more often than they win. But many do go on to win later, on subsequent occasions. Oregonians rejected a state income tax six times in the 1920s before finally adopting one in the Great Depression. Losing before winning has been common for decades:
Pricing carbon pollution. In 2016, climate hawks in Washington state tried to hold climate polluters accountable by putting on the ballot a state carbon tax shift. Initiative 732 won less than 41 percent of the vote. Two years later, in 2018, a new climate coalition put Initiative 1631 for a carbon fee on the ballot and won 43 percent support. In 2021, the state legislature adopted a price on carbon pollution as part of the Climate Commitment Act. This year, anti-climate forces put Initiative 2117 on the ballot to repeal that law. On November 5, voters turned this measure down by 62 percent. Thus, in the space of eight years, Washington voters moved 21 points on the question of charging for carbon pollution.
Legalizing marijuana. After a court ruling legalizing small quantities of marijuana in Alaska, some 54 percent of voters there recriminalized it in 1990. Voters next approved a 1998 measure legalizing it for medical uses before rejecting legalization of recreational use in 2000, with 41 percent support, and in 2004, with 44 percent support. A decade later, in 2014, Alaskans legalized marijuana with 53 percent support. In 14 years, a minority of 41 percent grew to a 54-percent majority.
Four-year terms. Governors of Idaho used to serve only two-year terms, and in 1914, just 30 percent of voters supported a proposal to double terms to four. Four-year terms won 52 percent support, though, on a 1928 ballot measure. That’s a 22-point jump in 14 years. Unfortunately, state courts overturned the 1928 measure, and only in 1944 did voters get a chance again. Some 62 percent approved four-year terms, a doubling of support in three decades.
Tobacco taxes. Oregonians rejected cigarette taxes six times between 1926 and 1956, with support never breaching 47 percent. Ten years later, though, in 1966, some 63 percent approved the tax. Since then, Oregonians increased tobacco taxes in 1972, 1996, 2002, and 2020.
Privatizing liquor sales. Starting in 1934 after Prohibition, Washington sold hard liquor exclusively in state-run stores. In 1972, some 45 percent of voters rejected a proposal to privatize the liquor business. In 2010, two more initiatives to privatize sales failed, with 35 and 47 percent support respectively. But in 2011, Washingtonians did away with state-run liquor sales by 59 percent of the vote.
Losing—while gaining lessons to win
In this context, first-time ballot measures for ranked choice voting that got about 40 percent support, as did Oregon’s and Montana’s, do not seem hopeless at all. They just seem like a bruising round one.
And the ballot measure for open primaries that got tantalizingly close to victory in Montana seems like an invitation to try again. There’s ample reason to soldier on.
None of which is to say that trying the exact same things over again is smart. Losses teach lessons. The split reactions in Montana to open primaries (48.9 percent) and ranked choice voting (39.6 percent) suggest the former may be ready for statewide prime time while the latter is not. Indeed, unified, all-candidate primaries might hold appeal not only in Montana but also in Idaho. And maybe Oregon voters, who rejected ranked choice voting, would also warm to unified primaries soon. A strategic question to consider is whether open, top-four primaries without ranked choice voting general elections are a valuable interim step. They could be.
Reformers would do well to study their losses carefully and revise their strategies in response, then keep trying.
Alaska 2020’s lesson: The power of local proof and voter experience
Another question worth mulling is whether the 2020 win for open primaries and ranked choice voting in Alaska taught reformers the wrong lesson. Public debate in that 2020 campaign was mostly about a separate provision in the measure, which required public disclosure of campaign contributors. It was not about open primaries or ranked choice voting. In the end, the election was a squeaker, with victory for reform coming by only one percentage point.
Before the Alaska win, most reformers focused on winning changes at the city level, in hopes of working their way up to statewide changes later. That’s what happened in Maine, where the city of Portland used ranked choice voting successfully for five years before anyone tried a state ballot measure campaign in 2016. A leader of that campaign told me in 2017 that the most persuasive ads in support of the state measure were person-on-the-street interviews with random people in Portland (Maine). Portlanders liked their system, and other Mainers trusted them. They did not trust experts or political leaders.
The 2020 Alaska win made many reformers think they could skip the local step, and they made an ambitious gamble. They ran state-level ballot measures in Idaho, Montana, and Oregon, along with Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and South Dakota. Maybe the real lesson of Alaska in 2020 was that sometimes you get lucky. Or that Alaska is friendlier terrain for reform because of its plurality of independent voters: they outnumber registered Democrats and Republicans combined. Maybe most reformers should have stayed focused on building up a network of working city-level models.
Just so, in Oregon, was it perhaps too soon to launch a statewide campaign for ranked choice voting, considering that the largest Oregon city of Portland just adopted ranked choice voting in 2022 and had not even conducted one election under the new system? (It did so in 2024, to good effect.) Perhaps proving success in Portland will set the stage for statewide victory next time.
In 2015, in a parallel case, Seattle voters adopted democracy vouchers as a novel form of public campaign funding. They adopted the program with 63 percent support. Before the program was even operating, reformers rushed a statewide measure for democracy vouchers to the ballot in 2016, which lost with 47 percent support. Waiting for proof of concept in Seattle might have been wiser.
Alaska 2022’s lesson: Ranked choice elections favor positive campaigning, not one party over another
A different election in Alaska, in 2022, may have also taught people the wrong lesson, which made reform harder to defend there and harder to win elsewhere. In the 2022 election for the state’s one at-large seat in the US House, which had been occupied by a Republican for the past half-century, a peculiar dynamic yielded a win for moderate Democrat Mary Peltola. Peltola’s victory cheered Democrats across the United States and convinced many Republicans in the state and elsewhere that open primaries and ranked choice voting favor liberals. It’s not true! That’s the wrong lesson. The same election handed victories to conservative Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy and moderate Republican US Senator Lisa Murkowski, and the reform has hardly changed the partisan makeup of the state legislature.
Still, the 2022 race was odd, with Republicans Sarah Palin and Nick Begich misplaying their hands and attacking each other fiercely, which is bad strategy in a ranked choice election. The best strategy is to promote your own strengths while indicating your support as second choices to rivals whose voters overlap with your own. Begich and Palin should have endorsed each other: “Vote for me and rank her/him second!” Instead, after a campaign of the two Republicans salting the earth with intra-party attacks, many of Begich’s voters ranked Peltola rather than Palin second. Many actually refused to rank Palin at all. When officials eliminated third-place finisher Begich and tallied his ballots’ second choices, Peltola won. The correct lesson of 2022 for Republicans was that they should have run positive, pro-Republican campaigns in ranked choice elections.
This year, Palin did not run, and Begich easily consolidated Republican votes, beating Peltola comfortably. This result has disappointed Democrats, no doubt, but it may also disabuse them and Republicans of the notion that open primaries and ranked choice voting favor one party over the other. They don’t. They favor positive campaigning.
With Republicans once again holding all statewide positions in Alaska, will another repeal attempt even materialize there? Will the merits of open primaries and ranked choice voting for conservatives become apparent to Republicans in the state? Will the lesson reach conservatives in other states, that the Peltola win was a result not of ranked choice voting but of boneheaded strategy by Palin and Begich?
Cascadia 2024’s lesson: Go big, lose big, learn big
These questions and others deserve reflection and analysis. But right about now, reformers may be feeling in no mood for study hall, so chagrined are they that their $45 million bet on five Cascadian ballot measures yielded only one win, barely. They may feel like throwing in the towel.
The situation brings to mind a story former IBM CEO Thomas Watson told: a man made a disastrously bad call for his business, costing the firm $10 million. The CEO called the man in, and the man said he understood why he was being fired, but the CEO said, “Fired? Hell, I spent $10 million educating you. I just want to make sure you learned the right lessons.” That’s the appropriate attitude toward the ballot measures of 2024.
The right lessons of 2024 remain to be discerned, of course. They may be that different strategies or tactics are in order, that the details of the reforms need adjusting or resequencing, or that campaign plans need overhauling. Trying all of those things is a good idea. Gathering and evaluating available evidence is a must.
The stakes of reform are as high as ever. To solve the dozens of tenacious problems that afflict Cascadia, from climate change to homelessness, from the high cost of living to the epidemic of drug overdoses, the region needs its democracies tuned to work better. We need public institutions that represent the public, reflect society’s values, consider the best science, understand the law, and deliver the changes they promise. From our leaders, we need less vilification, spite, and polemics, and more wisdom, collaboration, and compromise: more us, less us/them.
Open primaries and ranked choice voting do not guarantee us these things. Nothing does. But they are a big upgrade over the status quo. That’s why they’re worth investing a lot more than $45 million in. Losing some ballot measures this year is disappointing, no doubt, but the only tragic outcome would be giving up.
On the long road to reform, losing is not the problem. Quitting is.
Thanks to Al Vanderklipp for research assistance.
